“En quête de mémoire”: a local exhibition by young people
A few weeks ago now I visited an exhibition put on by the group R.E.T.I.F (Rencontres Echanges entre Travailleurs Immigrés et Français retif.asso@freesbee.fr). The primary activity of the association, insofar as I understand it, is to run literacy classes, mostly for the migrant workers who live in the foyer in which the association has its base. However, they also run after-school type activities and for the last few months a group of young people (aged 14 to 25, approximately) have been working with a volunteer anthropologist on a project entitled “En quête de mémoire”. I first met them when I found myself in the same group as them for a visit to the Porte dorée. It turned out they were planning a trip to London to visit 19 Princelet Street and I was pleased to be able to help answer some questions and to be present in London for their visit. The exhibition they put together in their space was the fruit of this research and was inspired by those visits. I was delighted to be able to visit both in my own capacity, and as a Princelet Street volunteer. (see previous post)
The young people had done a fantastic job transforming limited resources into a stimulating exhibition. They had obviously absorbed all sorts of key ideas in exhibition design; the importance of using different media, of facilitating access and stimulating interest for a range of visitors, of interactivity and of engaging reflection. The relationship between the individual and the collective was also very present and the young people had clearly all drawn on their own stories and experience to develop and present a complex understanding of the dynamics of immigration. Whilst it was great to see all the exhibits, for me the highlight was the discussion they inspired; the exhibition was not an end in itself but rather a way of creating a public forum and a prompt for discussion.
For example, while I was there one of the literacy teachers dropped in. She felt strongly that it was harder for new waves of immigrants to integrate than it had been in the past, and that Islamic values were probably incompatible with Republicanism. And (to my astonishment) she wanted to know what recent immigrants could learn from the exhibition about how they should and shouldn’t behave in order to integrate. I watched whilst one of the young project leaders confidently took her arguments apart, starting with the assumption that there is such a thing as an ‘authentic’ French culture to which immigrants should adapt. « Ce n’est pas une question d’un “apport” [à la France], c’est s’apporter les uns aux autres. » I sincerely doubt that before participating in the project she would have been so confident in articulating such sophisticated ideas. What, I asked, had they learned from and during the project? Well, lots about their parents and their families that they didn’t previously know. And, I would add, a huge amount of confidence, not to mention the ability to analyze complex social phenomena.
Their work is to be recognized by the Mairie du XIIème, which has given them permission to plant a ‘Memory tree’ outside the Mairie in the autumn. And the project, I am told, has only just begun. Good luck to them all and thank you for permission to reproduce my photos from the exhibition here.
Traditional dress – making the most of the available display space.
“Listen to us” – making voices present and helping to make the exhibition accessible to some of the (many) largely illiterate visitors.
A simple lettuce (!). The first thing one group member’s mother bought on arrival in France, astonished by the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables (coming from a drought-ravaged region of Africa).
Memory traces – footprints in the group’s different languages.
The ‘Memory tree’, with messages (memories of immigration) attached by visitors. The tree symbolizes roots but also hope and new beginnings. I added a version of the quotation from George Steiner.
The classroom becomes an activity space for younger visitors and a gallery.
August 6, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Mary, this is a great example of the use of exhibition as a process as well as a product (“the exhibition was not an end in itself but rather a way of creating a public forum and a prompt for discussion”) that I would love to hear more about if you attend the next NaMu. This, and your Gupta & Ferguson comments, are the kinds of comments I found missing in the past NaMu workshop.
August 6, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Yes, I agree with you about ‘process’. In a way, having no prior experience of staging exhibitions and next to no resources this young people were forced to take the idea of curation back to its basics. They took nothing for granted because they had no assumptions about what an exhibition ’should’ or should not do and they had to be imaginative. Because they had to learn everything – including how to stage an exhibition – they were perhaps more open to learning about the contents as they went along than established curators might be, who sometimes approach content as just the next exhibition. I’m also really interested in the way museum and exhibition models travel, something that was very apparent here because I’m familiar with all the places they visited (very familiar in some cases) and knew exactly where their ideas came from and how they’d adapted them. I’m not sure if I’m going to the next NaMu; I guess I’ll see when the call for submissions comes out. But thanks for your comments – I’m glad you’ve found them interesting.